Zsnes / usb Joystick Driver for DOS

[raeumler]

hi there,

i'm working on a gameconsole that works just with a floppy and load roms via shell in dos.
so the problem is, bret johnson wrote a dos driver which brings usb joypads to work under dos, but zsnes doesn't response to it, mean doesn't work with it. is there a way to make this drivers compatible with zsnes? i'm not a coder just a privat person who wants to have a hypernintendo ;>

the drivers are here:
http://bretjohnson.us/

there work fine with testprograms, bret told me that i should ask you if you could implent support for this drivers, would be very nice and i think i'm not the only one who really needs this. (also no emulator i'v testet works with it, whether nes or snes)

best regards and thx in advanced

raeumler

[paulguy]

Unfortunately, I doubt any support for this will be provided. As far as I know, the DOS version is pretty much dead. You'll have to dig yourself up some kind of 8 button gameport gamepad.

If you don't want very very old emulators with poor compatibility with games (I assume you're using Nesticle for NES.), I suggest you migrate over to Windows, or Linux.

[kode54]

From the sound of it, his brilliant plan does not include a hard drive. Otherwise, why the hell would he be using floppies? Why the hell would anybody still be using those?

[raeumler]

hi there,

its a heat problem with using a hdd or cdrom-drive, so i batcht a simple shell which is loaded from floppy, for loading roms from floppy... very funny, the only thing what doesnt work is the joypad support. when the dos version is dead, so i have to buy a gameport. damn... thanks anyway!



greets

raeumler

ps: i tried nesticle, and some other emulators, not one work with the usb-drivers, start to trying genesis emulators but destroyed my floppydrive... ;>

[badinsults]

Why in the hell would you do this?

I mean, if you are going to the effort of building such a thing, why are you using USB in the first place?

[Gil_Hamilton]

If it's truly a heat issue and for some reason you can't add a fan, move to a cooler drive(really, are you using velociraptors or something? Get a laptop drive. They're DESIGNED to keep working with little or no airflow.), or upgrade to a solid state drive(likely excessive for your purposes), I'd recommend going with USB flash drives or SD card readers.
They're FAR more useful, in that you can FIT entire SNES games on them. And the BIOS will likely offer legacy support, making them visible to DOS.

Let the floppy die. It had a good run, but it's time.




And I refuse to believe you can overheat a CD-ROM drive. Or that it will generate enough heat to detrimentally affect whatever the rest of your system is.
Your CPU is dumping more heat than any drive will generate, just based on the fact that you're using a board with USB.

[raeumler]

oh its not the hdd or the cdromdrive what is overheating, its the cpu. there is not enough space inside the box where the mainboard and so on is inside. there is a fan on the upside but its for cooling the graphiccard and its not enough to cool the complete box, also the mainboard is such old that there is only one fan connector onboard. (its an old amd 1,6 ghz).

i tried usb because i have no gameportblend/card, and there is not enough place in the box to place a gameportcard.

and the thing with the floppy is real cool, i have an basic-script which detects if there is a disk with a rom on the floppy and which starts into zsnes if it is so, like the amiga (but it doesn't work right now, because there is a conflict between the screenmodes and the resolutions which are used when a rom is starting). i have two 'os' for that box, the other is c64 like with short commands like disk/load to load or list the disk, both 'os' are dos based, and i was really happy to find a usb joypad driver....but it won't work with zsnes, i heard something about dpmi mode and that the gameport is called by it and that that is the reason why it dont work... but as you said that the dos-version is quite dead, there is no other way then buy a gameport and cut it...

if you want to have a look on it, here are some pictures.

http://wp10612258.wp264.webpack.hosteur ... rtendo.rar

nothing special, just a box with an old mainboard...

greets

raeumler

[kode54]

Here, I uploaded the whole lot to an imgur album:

hypertendo


... Classy junkyard build you got there.

[paulguy]

I'd see about booting to a USB stick or something. Even 1GB could store a small Linux and a good few ROMs. If the board can't boot from USB you can probably use a boot floppy to handle booting to the USB stick.

[raeumler]

yeah, second should work... but then there is no floppy and no own 'os' ^^

[odditude]

it's in a cardboard box. you have no proper ventilation (and no, the fan on the CPU heatsink does not count as "proper ventilation"). the chipset is going to cook itself in short order.

oh, and running DOS on a K8 chip is only slightly less absurd than trying to do all this from floppies.

put it in a case with some proper airflow, boot off of usb (either flash drive or SD) into linux, and be done with it.

[raeumler]

you dont see the point, a linux on a hdd or a usb stick will work for sure, but i dont want this... than its just a pc in a box. its just the special feeling using floppies to play snes games (or something similar), the second thing that i dont want to use a keyboard or a mouse to control it, therefore the basicscript (which was working already, i only changed something and put it in the corner 2 years ago)... hope you understand, sure from the technical side its stupid, but not from the "its working" side ;>

ps: the ventilation for cpu is under the turkis plastikpiece (i dont know the english word for it) so it works fine like it is at the moment, adding a harddrive and there is to much heat from the side, so that it runs 5 minutes and go off because of temperatur, already tested.

pps: its an amd 1,6ghz@1,2ghz with 256 mb ddr ram

[kode54]

And if you want a real special feeling running SNES games off floppies, try to locate a floppy-based SNES copier device on eBay. Then you'll increase the number of people in this world still using those to something like 8.

[paulguy]

Yeah, also a lot of SNES games are over 1.44MB, or even 2.88M if you have anything funky like that. What about ZIP disks if you're going for absolutely bizarre?

EDIT: Also, there are plenty of frontends for linux that'll boot up right away, and are fully gamepad controlled.

[sweener2001]

i remember sticking my floppies into my snes and playing for hours without a care in the world.

[badinsults]

I'm amazed a system like that can even run zsnes at full speed.

[Gil_Hamilton]

I'm amazed a system like that can even run zsnes at full speed.

If it's a a 1.6 GHz "AMD" like he says(that places it about the old Thunderbirds)... That'll tear through ZSNES with clock cycles to spare. Even in Windows XP. Get it down to bare silicon like he is with that DOS boot floppy, and, well...
Got a 1.3 TBird around here myself, so I speak from experience.
I admit to being very surprised he found working DOS drivers for that board, though.


Classy chassis, though.
Really, a cardboard box and packing tape... I'm more stunned at THAT than anything else.

[raeumler]

dont know what i should use as box than that, dont have the money for making a real plastikthing ;>

no drivers for mainboard needed, they are universal drivers....

[kode54]

Oh, crap, did you mean turquoise, the color? The spelling you used isn't even phonetically correct.

Ah, yes. Tüerkis, apparently equivalent to turquoise. LOLDEUTSCH.

[Gil_Hamilton]

dont know what i should use as box than that, dont have the money for making a real plastikthing ;>

no drivers for mainboard needed, they are universal drivers....

Really? A TBird mobo with a sound chip that boots in soundblaster-compatible mode with no software required?

Shit, I would've killed for one of those.

[raeumler]

Ar, no. There iss no automatic sound driver, there is no sound implented at the moment, but i think normal sb drivers will work, if they fit on the startup disk, i cant try it at the moment cause i fragged my floppydrive and have to wait for a new one.

Yes i mean the color

[Gil_Hamilton]

Ah, yeah... I was SURE I typed the word sound in there somewhere.

Anywho... there may in fact BE DOS drivers for that sound chipset. Good luck finding them, though.

[Deathlike2]

It is a simple fact that PCI based sound cards MUST use their hardware's DOS sound driver/app to operate properly in DOS. There are no exceptions to this rule AFAIK. SB compatibility relies on the fact that the IRQ must be at least 5 or 7.. all PCI sound cards have some form of IRQ routing... so it will almost never use those ports.. but even then, you'd still need the sound card's DOS drives to properly run SB emulation.

AFAIK, there is no such thing as a universal DOS driver for emulating the SB... other than DOSBox. It is easy to have a CD full of Windows drivers you can put onto any system (or even a universal DOS CD/DVD driver), but that's it.

BTW, there are universal USB drivers for DOS:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sour ... 8&aql=&oq=

This stuff is supposed to work on USB3.0 as well... but no guarantees made for joysticks... just USB external drives (hdd or optical, maybe even floppies) and printers. I have definitely used a USB flash drive and it's worked fine.